Ronald Pearsall - The Worm in the Bud

[andydecker]

Ronald Pearsall: The Worm in the Bud – The World of Victorian Sexuality (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1969 – This edition Penguin Books 1983, 672 pages)

Introduction

Part One – The Imperious Desire

1. The Aristocracy
Albert and Victoria
Life at Court
The Marlborough Hose Set
The Top Ten Thousand

2 The Lesser Infortune
The Leisure Classes
Masher and Swell
Love in the East End

3 A Dream of Fair Women
Sex Appeal
The Submissive Woman
The Predatory Woman
The Girl of the Period
The Nude
Dress

4 Courtship, Love and Marriage
The Courtship Ritual
Marriage
Romantic Love and Marriage
Divorce
Adultery
The Free Love Movement

5 The Facts of Life
Childbirth and Women's Diseases
Menstruation
Birth Contral
Venereal Disease
The Facts of Life

Part Two
The Victorian Buried Life

6 Prostitution
Aristocratic Fun
Men about Town
The Demi-Semi-Monde
Facts and Figures
Working-Class Prostitution
Child Prostitution
The Stead Case
The Whitechapel Murders

7 Perversion
Crimes against the Person
Flagellation
Two Facets of Perversion
The Cult of the Little Girl

8 Pornography
Pornography
The Pornography
Sexual Humour
The Language of Victorian Sex

9 The Psychology of Victorian Sex
Anxiety
Repression
Victorian Dream Theory
The Dream World of Duskin

10 Against the Norm
Homosexuality
The Boulton and Park Case
The Cleveland Street Scandal
Lesbianism
Edward Carpenter and the Intermediate Sex
Bachelors
A Trio of Oddities

Conclusion

Note on Sources

Notes and References

Bibliography of Periodicals and Journals

Index

One can't complain that you don't get enough for your moneys worth. This is a hefty tome. 672 pages of small print. I just browsed a few pages so far. Loved the "London City Map" with 53 marked locations like "The Nag's Head, Tower Hill, 'a low Cock-and-hen Club' or "Piccadilly, where the pornographic publisher Hotten set up shop at number 151b'".  This promises to be a lot of fun. 

[dem bones]

Thanks for posting, Andreas. Should you enjoy it, I recommend his Night's Black Angels: The Forms & Faces of Victorian Cruelty (more of the same, judging by those chapter headings). The Table-Rappers is great fun too.

[dem bones]

Here's the Night's Black Angels TOC. Comparing the two books, looks like this one skips the niceties and cuts straight to the chase. An alarming read!

Ronald Pearsall - Night's Black Angels (Hodder & Stoughton, 1975)

DOMESTIC AND SOCIAL CRUELTY

Introduction

Domestic Cruelty
The Disciplinarians
The Subjugation of Women
Social One-Upmanship
Religious Cruelty

THE UNDERDOGS

The Mad and the Sick
The Nether World
The Workhouse

INDUSTRIAL CRUELTY

What About the Workers?
The Cruel Trades
Sweated Labour
Child Labour

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The Prison System
The Convicts Speak
Amateurs of Suffering
The Armed Forces

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

Animals for Pleasure
The Work of the R.S.P.C.A.
Vivisection

SEXUAL CRUELTY

Persecution of the Outsider
White Slave Traffic
Cruelty for Pleasure - The English Vice

A Select Bibliography
Index

Blurb:
Cruelty is always shocking, but it is easy to shrug one's shoulders and pretend that it is not happening. We are guilty of this, but we do not systematically use cruelty as a class weapon or social deterrent as the Victorians did. Night's Black Angels is an indictment of hypocrisy and selfishness, ruthlessness and indifference, a review of a time when the demands of progress made slaves of men, women and children, and cruelty was only reprehensible if the middle classes were upset.

Callousness was part and parcel of the business of living, and the borderline between firmness and cruelty was deliberately blurred; we see this in the treatment of children, the poor, the mad, convicts, soldiers and sailors, and all who were vulnerable. Cruelty bred cruelty. In the slums of London and the industrial cities it was so commonplace that it was not worth commenting upon. Hopelessness and drink produced frightening savagery. And few cared.

Matters, however, were improving. No one was burned as a heretic, no one was drawn and quartered. Public execution was abolished, to the annoyance of those termed amateurs of suffering, and measures to ease the lot of those who had suffered most were introduced. But cruelty still permeated Victorian life, in all forms, psychological and physical, from the social snub to the torture of convicts on the treadmill.

Ronald Pearsall has researched extensively in contemporary sources and his investigations cover the whole conspectus of Victorian society. Never a sensationalising account, this is nevertheless a sobering indictment of man's inhumanity to man.

[Swampirella]

FYI "Night's Black Angels" is at Arch*ve but not "Worm in the Bud".